When Adult Swim aired the highly anticipated third season of Rick and Morty last summer, the episode “Pickle Rick” quickly rose to become an all-time fan favorite, inspiring countless toys and merchandise. The premise, if you’ll recall, involves Rick literally turning himself into a pickle to avoid a family therapy session. Of course, one thing leads to another — as it so often does on this show — and Rick manages to build himself a super suit out of rat parts and winds up in the super secret lair of some diabolical super villain.
Rick manages to take out the entire organization in his pickle form, as he is wont to do, and along the way befriends a captive prisoner named “Jaguar,” who later shows up in the post-credits scene to help Rick get out of a sticky situation.
It’s that post-credits scene — that was apparently a nod to the popular The New Batman Adventures series, which originally aired from 1997 to 1999, in an episode called “Legends of the Dark Knight — as recently pointed out on Reddit by user Capgunkid.
Rick and Morty are captured by a villain named “Concerto” and tied to a giant piano with equally giant head squishing keys. Just as the duo have given up all hope, Jaguar comes swinging in to rescue them.
In the animated Batman episode, the Joker uses a similar device to try to smash the intrepid heroes into a jelly.
But wait, there’s more! As another Redditor pointed out, the Batman: The Animated Series piano scene seems to pay homage to a 1966 episode of the Adam West era “Batman” series, in which Liberace guest stars as a villain named Chandell who attempts to kill Batman and Robin by strapping them to a paper puncher for making player piano music.
Mind blown. It’s kind of just like that movie Inception, only if Inception made sense.
(Via Reddit)
